The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

The Financial Services industry, better known as Wall Street, would quickly admit (even without enhanced interrogation) that it doesn’t manufacture any actual goods such as automobiles, toasters, or carrot peelers. With a few waterboardings, they will confess that they don’t even provide real/personal services such as child care, teaching, gardening, hairstyling, taking bets on whether New Orleans will survive the next big hurricane …

So, why do hedge fund managers receive salaries of over a billion dollars a year? They say they earn the money because they increase the value of the portfolios they manage by many billions. But, it is illusory money, especially if invested in derivatives or market indices. There even are Volatility Indices, known in the industry as fear factor indices. One of the members of the Gadfly Revelry & Research team calls them yellow belly futures. You can trade (bet on) these investment products — call your broker immediately.

As Wall Street money is created in a house of mirrors, they are always looking for sources of real money they can raid. To access the billions of dollars in the Pentagon budget (taxpayer money), war was declared on Afghanistan. Poor, helpless Afghanistan — no air force, no navy, not even any tanks. A year and a half later, while the Afghanistan war was still on, we invaded Iraq. Again, the Iraqis had no air force, but a navy boasting several inflatable rubber boats with outboard motors, some antique tanks, and a number of pick-up trucks. The US military, of course had to order lots of cruise missiles, a new generation of pilotless “drone” aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles, special cannons that fire depleted uranium shells, new helicopters to back up  those that would be disabled by frequent sandstorms, and many tanker trucks for the gasoline that the F 16’s burn at the rate of over 13 gallons per minute. Measuring fuel efficiency in miles per gallon is not in the military lexicon. Don’t ask what an aircraft carrier burns. The good news is that the defense industry contractors actually made things — weapons & bombs — nevermind that they were designed to go boom. The government paid for them handsomely.

Then, to promote capitalism to the Near East, State Department funds were used to hire private armed contractors to protect our ambassador and diplomats in the Green Zone — Black Water, Triple Canopy, Dyn Corp, and Custer Battles — work once performed by the Marines, but now at five times the cost.

Back in the US, the banks offered home equity loans at healthy interest rates and late payment fees that made librarians look like Socialists by charging only token fees for overdue books. The banks also enticed first time homeowners into variable mortgages that started at come-on interest rates for the first year. When the homeowners came armed with magnifying glasses to read the fine print and found out that their mortgage payments would increase wildly in subsequent years, they were reassured that by then their houses would surely be worth much more and they could refinance at more favorable rates. But, the real estate bubble burst, the unaffordable rates kicked in, and so the banks just had to foreclose. No, just because the foreclosures have been running over a million a year doesn’t make it a conspiracy.

With real estate as a resource completely depleted, Wall Street had to find another pool of real money. Lo and behold, there were all those 401K retirement funds, more real money. The investment houses (now, they’re called banks) got the fund managers to invest most 401Ks in the stock market. At the moment, they are trying to convince workers to borrow against  their retirement money, sort of an equity loan. How else to live an American lifestyle that is the envy of the rest of the world?

Meanwhile, Wall Street was salivating over the $2.4 trillion (trillion with a t) Social Security Trust Fund. The money was just sitting there doing nothing useful except keeping half the senior citizen population from the bread line and soup kitchens. The banksters convinced Congressman Paul Ryan to take the lead in arranging a privatization assault. So, first he renamed Social Security and Medicare “entitlements,” as if they were not earned during a working lifetime. The seniors in Ryan’s own district in Wisconsin gave him what for. He immediately beat a strategic retreat and said seniors and almost seniors (those over  50) would never be affected. Paul must be a poor orphan, not realizing that many of today’s seniors have children who are under 50. Under the Ryan takeover plan, they would be at the mercy of the sometimes misfortunes of the stock market. His senior constituents rightly don’t trust him.

As to Medicare, medical costs in the US are number 1 in the world. It is not because the US is number 1 in medical care. We are neither in the top 40 in healthy life expectancy nor the lowest 40 in infant mortality. But we enjoy: more testing, more surgery, more specialist consultation, more medication, and more emergency room visits than anywhere on earth. Paul Ryan would love to use the argument that private insurance companies are more efficient than the government and could keep costs under control. But he is silent on that account because Medicare is known to keep its administrative costs to under 3% — no marketing costs, no profits for the stockholders, and no million dollar salaries for the CEO. Ryan’s senior constituents have warned him to keep his hands off their Medicare. He may be reluctant to lock horns with the voters in his district.

The latest corporatization attempt is the US Post Office, which runs about $70 billion in annual revenues and holds a $42 billion Retirement Health Benefit Fund. $115 billion doesn’t sound like much, but it’s real money and Wall Street is getting desperate. The Postal Service has done well by serving the people and paying its own way — mail service every day, 44¢ for a first class letter, and post offices nearby even in rural counties. Despite the advent of e-mail, the USPS was covering its operating costs and did not require a bail out from the government.

So, the corporateers and their co-conspirators in Congress increased the expenses of the USPS to show that a government-run agency was wasteful & inefficient and, of course, had to be corporatized. The Postmaster was encouraged to hire more and superfluous administrators to bring the ratio to one per ten mail handlers. One per thirty — the same as schoolteachers to students — would have been more than enough. Then, third class mail was given loss-leader rates — sometimes capitalism needs a little help. Finally, came the coup de grace. The Postal Service was required by law to pre-fund 75 years of pension benefits in 10 years — something corporations never do for their employees. This pre-funding requirement costs the Postal Service $5.5 billion per year. The conservatives in cahoots with Wall Street told us only that the Post Office is running deficits because it hasn’t kept up with modern technologies and, as a consequence, the wolves of insolvency are at the door. In truth, the fat cats were breaking in the door with fire-axes of half-truths and innuendos (some have said they were lies, but we know Congress never lies).

We need the Post Office — 1st class mail and media mail (newspapers and books), especially. Let’s tell our elected representatives to keep their hands off our Postal Service.

The people — most of the 99% — seeing the corporate grab of all the real money as detailed in the above paragraphs, are coming together in the Occupy Wall Street movement and the US Uncut protests. It’s time for an American Spring.